Hanford Public Tours
Tour Information

The Department of Energy has set dates for the 2010 Public Tour Program at the Hanford Site. A total of sixty public tours are planned, with tours beginning at 7:30 a.m. and 9:30 a.m. each day on the following dates:

• April 13, 14, 20, and 21
• May 4, 5, 18, and 19
• June 1, 2, 3, 15, 16, 29, and 30
• July 1, 13, 14, 15, 27, 28, and 29
• August 10, 11, 12, 24, 25, and 26
• September 14, 15

All tours begin and end at the B Reactor Tour Headquarters, located at 2000 Logston Blvd., Richland, off of Highway 240. Each tour lasts approximately five hours.

Registration will begin at 12:01 a.m., PST, on Tuesday, March 9, 2010. All tour slots are filled on a first-come first-served basis through an online registration system. Tour participants must be United States citizens and at least 18 years of age. There is no cost to participate in a Hanford Public Tour.

All tour participants will board buses at the Reactor Tour Headquarters, located at 2000 Logston Boulevard, Richland, Washington. A Hanford employee provides visitors with a guided tour of the Hanford Site, which includes an overview of Hanford’s role in the nation’s defense effort during World War II and the Cold War, as well as information on today’s environmental cleanup mission. The tour route includes a drive by of Hanford’s 300 Area where uranium was fabricated into fuel rods; the nine nuclear reactors in the 100 Area located along the Columbia River where the fuel rods were irradiated to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons; and the original Hanford and White Bluffs town sites. Visitors also will have a 75-minute guided walking tour of the historic B Reactor, the world’s first full-scale nuclear reactor.

Additionally, the tour includes briefings at several Hanford facilities supporting today’s cleanup mission:

• Hanford’s Cold Test Facility (CTF), a mock-up of one of Hanford’s 177 underground nuclear waste storage tanks;
• the Environmental Restoration Disposal Facility (ERDF), where Hanford’s low-level radioactive, hazardous, and mixed cleanup waste are disposed in a massive landfill with a capacity of over 11 million tons;
• the new construction site of the 200 West Groundwater Treatment Facility, which once completed in December 2011 will have the capacity to pump contaminated water from the ground and remove several chemical and radioactive contaminants at a rate of 2500 gallons per minute.

Additional information regarding the Hanford Site can be found at http://www.hanford.gov/page.cfm/AboutUS

For questions on participation in the Hanford Public Tours, please refer to the Frequently Asked Questions, or send an email to HanfordPublicTours@rl.gov.